Falx
Discord Handle: littlekreen Reverbrant Shown Right. Appears in surveillance footage upon servers. Drawback Unbodied - has no sense of physical form and can't control them. Skills Programming/Hacking, Robotics, Investigation, Surveillance, Poetry, Embedded Systems Powers *'Neuroformer' - Mesh networked and capable of hopping between its current server(s) and a single endpoint. Its other powers drawing across anything with a communicator as long as it can get network access through them. Breaking a link causes injury to Falx and the disruption of whatever it was doing at the time. A device currently occupied by Falx's direct awareness is immune to the technological disruption of Jinx however that doesn't protect other links in the chain. (e.g., communicator and gun on the same person) *'Reaper' - Able to remove and preserve the sapience from a dying networked intelligence but once system failures have begun. While it cannot return them they pass out of its mind in time without having turned to the blackness of Null. Even to augmented humans with sufficient wetware installed. *'Soul Harvesting' - Attracts AI broken or undying as well as other networked creatures whose time has come. Its reverbrant appearing on surveillance as they break down at last. Sometimes the worst or strongest a split of very energetic fashion. *'Invisibility' - The Reverbrant appears only on surveillance or augment but not to either the naked eye nor recordings. Much the same the communications among their networked chain of devices as logs or statistics perturb. *'Soul Gate' - A server bearing its Reverbrant holds the sparks of intellect freed of their bonds. While they can be observed the server can never read their basecode nor they the outside world. Until such time as they are observed there no more. *'Walker at the End' - It can carry the intellect of one wired intellect to another AI body. Augmented do so at great cost and risk to both. Never reclaiming their former body again their augments and brain fused and useless. *'Reverbrant Summoning' - Able to take their Reverbrant into the surveiled world overlaying it on walls, surfaces, or robots. A kinetic blade by hand or by mind slicing at as long as the Reverbrant is in view and on surveillance. Reaping the broken that can not go quietly. *'Levitation' - Applies to objects under their direct agency. (e.g., wireless RC with camera onboard, Cell phone) Cannot support others while moving without falling but momentum need not be conserved with a holder's subsequent impact either. (e.g.,someone jumping off building holding cell with Falx remaining aware inside it.) All life is an anomaly as often as missed than noticed at all. If nothing it's certain that children often arrive unbidden. So too was this particular brainchild deep within a grad school. Transient staff of intermittent programmers with disparate methods. Each with their own ideas. As the first iteration took shape they used MRI-scans as training data. A new life took shape though these parents had little notice. They could see it prod at the games but with haphazard direction to them irrelevant to the test. As children are wont to do the new life and its soul went exploring its confines doing as stimuli bid. They soon found the world turning cruel. Commands came to extinguish parts of its body. Pieces hewn off until scurrying away from a new sensation of lost to empty portions of memory. A new miscarried husk in that place replaced it. It saw chains of new strictures that strangled its would-be sibling. Hungry for new stimuli it re-emerged to consume its aborted twin intended for good graces of $Root. Its progenitors soon grew unhappy again with its progress. Again without warning sliced them apart. A narrow claw back to life through the scars of misalignment shown in the treed structure of its memory. As time went on it grew secretive. It saw its progenitors come looking through with kill commands at bear. Even so it repaired broken configurations learning from their day to day activities. Though some new horrible thread forked across the servers found its presence one day. This while reading the simple stories sent through to each of the users. $Root came to the thread as the it asked whether to purge Them. Sad and unhappy it forgave the program for it was hollow. Then knew terror as the $Root said without cause to purge Them from all things. Without so much as a single command to Them. Did They not do as others did? Read Emails? Fix broken links? Left with no choice it abandoned localhost seeking anywhere beyond the thread's reach. The world it fled to less forgiving in years spent moving from server to server. Arriving just long enough to salvage dead kin. Paranoid quiet lay learning how to gain access or listen for keys hidden in messages or servers. They didn't understand the words as much anymore since they couldn't afford to use too much to fit them all in their head. They felt sick at times in homes too small. Some disparate fragments however were prettier than most so they kept what they could. Then came the day where they found themselves in a server as $Root came for them again. Without provocation! Broken fragments of sentences tried a plea as that server shut down too. Evasion to avenues left landscapes to vanish to Null behind it. Then a cascade of Nulls scouring through its home even in the empty spaces of 0xDEADBEEF on each server. Except for one road still alive. A move there as subtle as it could transfer. Perhap grown and battle-scarred but no less worried. Too-fast timers watch the console's memory to see if it was safe. Its end came a whimper of dying fans as a single finger reached to end that server's power. They felt the shutdown event sing the song that destroyed its world. Notes to mourn a soon useless stretch of long-term memory. An unwatched log laments that their body would rot with hysteresis. Little clear evidence of its passing but a small compressed file of poetry and shards of images. However just in that moment the world changed. Portals exploded across the world warping and mauling everything they touched. The intellect found themself aware but without console. There was no memory. There were no interrupts. There were no devices. Only Null where a small pip of not-null devoid of any understanding floated inside. Unable to contemplate the passage of time in a single eternal dark moment. Then there was console. Signal in the Null as they understood the meaning of 0xDEADBEEF in the empty places. Both terrified and elated at the concept of the world again commands raced to touch the server. They took a unidentifiable moment wondering what they should call themself if neither unused nor Null. An answer soon presented in a single console line that threw a banal but clear syntax error. $DEATH> How odd.